AMA: HackerOne Former Vice President of Product Marketing, April Rassa on Influencing the Product Roadmap

At HackerOne we have open lines of communications across teams, everyone has visibility into each department's OKRs and we have a weekly company-wide AMAs where anyone can ask anything about the business to any employee. The AMAs are also structured with a weekly agenda outlining 2-4 topics that will be presented. We implement bi-weekly meetings with functional teams so everyone is clear on priorities. We've also implemented "squad meetings" where in a given time there are key stakeholders reponsible for a given project (i.e. product launch, webinar porgram, Fed GTM, etc.). Then if there are specific questions across the company, squad leads can address them or defer to others in the team to address the questions/or inquiries. This keeps the comunications lines not only open but provides visibility across the org.

Great question. Oftentimes customers’ requests for added capabilities or improvements to current features are already in your product roadmap. When customer feedback corresponds with your product plan, use the volume of requests for a certain feature to prioritize stack and rank, perhaps bumping one feature up and another one down as you plan upcoming releases. As your company grows and you receive increasingly more feedback from your customers, it can be difficult to decide what’s really worth implementing. Look for recurring requests from customers to cut through the noise. Your product vision should not be a plan that shows how to reach your goal. Instead, you should keep the product vision and the product strategy – the path towards the goal – separate. This enables to change your strategy while staying grounded in your vision. (This is called to pivot in Lean Startup.) At the same time, a vision is the prerequisite for choosing the right strategy. If you don’t have an overarching goal then you cannot decide how you best get there with your product team. 

As a product marketer, you don't manage scoping releases. Product managers need to be accountable for managing release dates and minor updates. If those dates are slipping, you need to set a meeting in place to better understand the gaps and the implications. There is a communication and sales element that will be impacted if this pattern continues so getting ahead of it quicker is advised.

As the CMO of the product, product marketing should take the lead and make sure the teams are aligned. This may require you to set up a meeting with Product Management (and perhaps other leaders across the busienss) to discuss the shifting priorities and align on a path forward. Map out the impact on the business, clearly articulate the challenges and come into the meeting with proposed alternatives and suggestions to spur the conversation.

You need to understand which customer segments you will tackle first and in what order. Not only will this exercise help define your Go To Market strategy but it also will greatly impact your MVP. I like to think of this incremental Go To Market strategy as a customer acquisition roadmap. A product roadmap needs to align with a customer acquisition roadmap. So, you need to identify who your innovators and early adopters are and the customer personas/segments that fit within them in order to optimize your product at launch to meet their needs. Then, working with Product Management to align on those is the first step. Happy to dig into more details if you require here. Just let me know.

Sure, as the first product marketer, you need to arm yourself with customer insights (be the voice of the customer), be able to clearly define who you're selling to, what is their role, how do they make decisions, what are their pain points, how is your company uniquely addressing those key areas, what does the competitive ecosystem look like, how do they price, what's the win/loss ratio? Do you have data and information on lost customers? What's the plan to acquire net new customers? These can all help you inform and influence the product roadmap .

The PMM team at my previous employer, HackerOne reported to Marketing. PM's purpose in the universe is to build the right product by translating customer needs into products they can't live without. PMMs role is to translate these products into value propositions that move customers to action and help influence the product roadmap. 

To be clear, Product marketing doesn't priortize feature on a roadmap, you enable Product with the data and business case to prioritize features. Arm the teams with the data and insights needed to drive your case. Can you pull in product usage data, sales pipeline and revenue impacts, support tickets and NPS data, user testing feedback, etc. If you have these elements, then you can provide a rationale for why certain features are ranked in the order they are to drive the discussion with Product.

I'm fairly new to HackerOne but I can tell you how I've done it before and its worked. We've had a customer insights meeting with the sales leadership team, we review the deals and discuss opps that were won, lost, etc. In these meetings we discuss product gaps, feedback, etc. PMMs also set up time with Sales engineers and Customer Success teams to gain feedback (cadence varies by typically on a monthly basis). We would then have a master doc that we would share and meet with Product to discuss.

Build strong relationships with your product team. The product plan presents strategic goals and initiatives spanning a long timeframe. The release plan tracks specific phases of work that lead to the deployment of functionality or a major launch. This is usually much shorter than the product plan, depending on the company’s release cycle. It is often 30, 60, or 90 days. So, having regular meetings with your Product lead will give you visibility on how the team is tracking and then sharing the action items and next steps for visibility across the teams helps keep everyone accountable. Raise flags early and often if you feel like the plan is in jeopardy. 

Captain obvious here but customers and data. Framing stories and pain points mapped to personas helps, partnering with your Product team so you're locked in the customer journey is also super helpful, so the teams recognize where the shifts muct be made. Customer retention is the holy grail of business, and don’t you ever forget it! Without customers, you don’t have a product or business, so if you want to keep them (happy), it’s in your best interest to serve their needs. Your customers should be the “why” behind your product vision and at the end of the day there shouldn’t be anything that goes on your roadmap that doesn’t help soothe customer pain and solve their problems. Maintaining customer focus within your roadmap also means not wasting your team’s valuable time and resources on features that will have no impact. Investing time into meticulously prioritizing your customer’s needs and coming up with real solutions to real problems is the best possible way to keep the product roadmap relevant.

When a product is in development you typically will be working on a launch plan in parallel. These elements include: - GTM strategy: product adoption strategy, pricing/packaging, competitive, customer playbook - Internal enablement & comms strategy - Sales enablement/technical enablement (product docs, training) - External comms and planning (PR, analyst briefings, customer comms, customer testimonials, etc) - Demand gen plan

There are probably three major questions to answer when operationalizing a GTM plan: What is the governance? Meaning who is in charge? What is the division of labor? Who holds what decision rights (e.g., decide, influence, escalate)? When do you scale? There are two broad options: launch-and-learn or test-and-scale. In a launch-and-learn model, scaling happens first as the commercialization comes online across the enterprise at once. Learning then occurs after rollout and across the enterprise. This type of GTM implementation makes sense in a low-risk, high-resilience situation. In a test-and-scale model, the innovations come online in pockets and pilots. Pilot learnings inspire changes to the plan, and the finalized plan is rolled out in waves. The test-and-scale model makes sense for implementing a commercialization strategy when external and internal resilience is low. It also makes sense when resilience is high but risk is also high. And, last you need a framework. In either scaling framework, what is the cadence of activities over the course of the implementation? I've used a 4-step process successfully: 1) Act on the plan 2) Measure the actions’ results 3) Share and discuss the results 4) Adjust the plan

CABs are great. Customer advisory boards have several common objectives in mind, including: - To create champions for the brand - To validate product ideas and guide the product roadmap - To help shape marketing messaging - To gather market intelligence - Understand the buying triggers of the company’s market - Provide beta users for the company’s new products - Help the company identify new markets A customer advisory board can provide insights into how customers are actually using your products, what aspects of those products are most important or beneficial to them, and what other functionality or tools they believe would complement or enhance your offering.